The real 'elephant in the room' when it comes to self-driving cars is liability.
Who carries the insurance when the car is being driven by a factory installed
gadget? And if there's an accident, is the gadget responsible? The owner??
The factory??? Some, all, or none????

Heh... if Google's AI is found at fault for an accident, whose license

gets points?

Microsoft will be held liable. Always. :)

The owner of the vehicle is typically the insurance holder, so the owner
is probably still on the hook for anything that happens, and if they're not
liable, they'll be held liable anyway, because lawyers.

This is the same reason you can't lease a car anymore in some states. Now
they call it "SmartBuy" and they claim it's new-and-improved but it's really
just a loan whose payments are structured like a lease (low with a gigantic
payoff at the end or you can surrender the vehicle). Some shyster figured
out how to hold the actual owner of the vehicle (the leasing company) liable
in an accident, so now they don't want to be the owner anymore.

In California you are required to register your car within 10 days of moving
here. Not a bad rule.

Now for the story:

In September 2001 - roughly 3 months after moving here - I was stopped by
CHP. The cp[2op said "I've seen you in this vehicle for a few months now,
and I am going to cite you for not registering it in California."

Me (never being afraid to share Reality with cops):

"Well, you can cite the OWNER to your heart's content - it is a leased vehicle
- so cite away. I will just show up in court and have my lease documents with
me. Get the BANK to do it, and they are in NEW JERSEY - not my job!"

I have a Greek friend who tells us often that in Greece all they do is sit around smoking cigarettes and talking about how much they hate America.

So their economy collapsed because they weren't, y'know, actually participating in civilization or anything. So the EU bailed them out, and as part of the bailout imposed austerity measures.

In response, Greece elected a far-left government whose leaders basically said "forget the austerity measures, we're going to continue to spend into oblivion, and all that money Germany loaned to us in the bailout, we don't have to pay it back because nazis, so there." (I'm paraphrasing but not exaggerating.)

So there's enough drama there to make the situation interesting to anyone who likes to follow the global socioeconomic stage.

Is that going to happen now? It seems that the people of Greece just voted
"no" to austerity measures, basically declaring that they are going to keep
spending money even though they're bankrupt and no one is going to lend them
any more money.